If you haven’t voted yet, you might want to read these pieces before you do. This election is about far more than the parlous state of the economy and the dismal job situation. Although those factors alone should have you running to the polls.

Behind the foolish wasted stimulus, and the regulatory nightmare that has American business sitting on their hands and their potential for hiring and expansion; is a worldview that is founded on the notion that experts in the state can, by rational improvisation and enlightened regulation, improve human nature and behavior to create a more perfect world. We’ve seen this brave new world many times before, and seen the destruction it leaves behind. Professor Bruce Thornton writes on “What This Election Is About: The Free Individual versus the Overpowering State.”

Adam Brodsky addresses “An endless string of broken promises.” There’s one big reason Democrats face disaster Tuesday. They’ve done almost nothing in the last two years to make anyone — left or right — want to vote for them. In 2008, recall, they made grand promises — to their base and to the center. They raised hopes through the roof.

Once in power, they kept virtually none of those vows. Instead, they took a whole different path —one neither side liked. Now they’re reaping the whirlwind. So what’s their game plan? Rinse and repeat.

That’s right. President Obama and fellow Dems are again promising “change” — after the elections. They failed the first time. They will again.

White liberals, like those at the all-white MSNBC, have been desperately attempting for months to smear the Tea Party as “racist” despite the fact that many Tea Party leaders, speakers, participants and Tea Party backedcandidates are themselvesminorities. Indeed, the propagandists at MSNBC even went so far as to claim that a man protesting Obamacare carrying a rifle over his shoulder and a handgun holstered on his hip was evidence of the racist nature of those who oppose the Obama agenda, while cropping the man’s head and hands out of the shot so their misinformed audience could not see that the armed Obama protester was a BLACK man.

So it is with particularly schadenfreudistic glee that I report not only how monochromatically WHITE the audience was at Jon Stewart’s White-Hipster-Youth Rally, but that in addition to being much less diverse than Glenn Beck’s rally, this great “progressive” show of force, was only a small fraction of the size of Beck’s rally. Considering how much they loathe Beck, and how desperately they were hoping to show him up — that’s really gotta sting.

Heh.

Now, to be fair, there were at least a handful of minorities at the rally. Perhaps even a dozen or so. If you look very carefully at the Continue reading →

If this election is a Republican wave, then what? President Obama is out on the campaign trail referring to Republicans as “enemies”— something he can’t even bring himself to call the Mullahs in Iran. Not promising.

Republicans will try very hard to limit the damage the president is doing to the economy, but the presidential veto awaits most efforts at corrective legislation. Some think the president will have to become more bipartisan, and move to the center, as Bill Clinton did in his second term.

I think Obama is far too ideological to shift to the center. He knows what he believes and has never shown any inclination at any time to compromise. The action will take place in the federal bureaucracy. He will advance the liberal agenda by administrative regulation and rule. There is a reason why he has over 35 unconfirmed and unaccountable Czars whose actions are unreported and whose salaries and duties are unknown. The president has already shown an inclination to get around laws he doesn’t like, rather than obey them.

How the bureaucracy works is well demonstrated by the carbon-emission limits imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA is working on shutting down coal-fired power plants, and gradually eliminating the entire coal industry. The Energy Department is working on more wind and solar installations in the name of elusive “green jobs.” The Secretary of the Interior is keeping drilling at bay. This is major, huge, change in the way that America operates, and nobody has voted on it, or approved it.

Government Motors is turning out electric cars. The administration is subsidizing battery factories. The Senate and Natural Resources Committee approved a bill on July 21, that would allocate $3.9 billion over 10 years toward building infrastructure for charging electric vehicles, continuing their development , and for incentives to encourage consumers to buy battery powered cars. The goal is to electrify half the country’s cars and trucks by 2030. The justification is that this would reduce the demand for oil in the U.S. by one-third.

This is just one of several bills that passed the committee which could become part of a larger energy and climate bill. They just won’t give up on this. The climate hasn’t warmed in the last decade. Carbon dioxide is one of the building blocks of life, a natural fertilizer for plants, and increases in CO2 in the atmosphere (only a trace gas) follow increases in temperature— which means that CO2 cannot be the cause of global warming. Climategate? Illegal computer hacking.

I don’t know if anyone has calculated the effect that electrifying half the country’s cars would have on our electric supply, but the brilliant radicals in the Obama administration are attempting an amazing trick. Eliminating as much as possible of our electricity generation, and at the same time placing incomprehensible demands on it.

1) They are working hard at discouraging or eliminating drilling for oil and natural gas. 2) They are effectively eliminating any new nuclear power by denying a place to store the waste. 3) They are assuming that wind and solar energy can replace efficient coal and natural gas (they can’t). 4) Wind and solar cannot exist without vast government subsidy. 5) All these efforts are guaranteed job killers.

Electric cars serve no purpose, neither environmental nor economic. For a president who claims to make policy based on facts and science, lavishing huge subsidies on electric cars and on wind and solar energy is an intellectual scandal. It is magical thinking. Corn-based ethanol is nothing more than a taxpayer rip-off. The administration’s supposed objectives — reducing carbon emissions and reducing dependence on “foreign oil,” are either blatant lies or slavish adherence to the cult of the environment.

That’s just the part that will be accomplished in the bureaucracy with regulation of energy and transportation (don’t forget the high-speed train scam). ObamaCare has been passed into law, and the 99 departments already created can now begin to create other rule-making departments. The mischief that can be done is endless.Big Government at its worst.

Yeah, yeah, you know who I mean. She Who Shall Not Be Named. I’m certainly not going to help people spell her name right. Besides, it fits.

Bout time Sarah! My only question, where’s this been hiding?

Yesterday, Lisa Murkowski’s hired guns threatened radio host Dan Fagan, and more importantly, the station that airs Fagan’s show, with legal action for allegedly illegal “electioneering.” The station, unlike Murkowski, who is flush with millions of dollars from vested corporate interests, does not have a budget for a legal defense. So it did what any small market station would do when threatened by Beltway lawyers charging $500 to $1000 an hour – they pulled Dan Fagan off the air.

Does all this sound heavy handed? It is. It is an interference with Dan Fagan’s constitutional right to free speech. It is also a shocking indictment against Lisa Murkowski. How low will she go to hold onto power? First, she gets the Division of Elections to change its write-in process – a process that Judge Pfiffner correctly determined had been in place without change for 50 years. She is accepting financial support from federal contractors, an act that is highly questionable and now pending before the FEC. And today, she played her last card. She made it clear that if you disagree with her and encourage others to exercise their civic rights, she’ll take you off the air. [read the rest]

Sore loser, self-entitled, princess Skeezy Mercury is precisely the type of politician that Americans need to flush out of congress: people who put power before principles, hell, people who don’t have any principles to put first to begin with. This race is unfortunately close. Help defeat She Who Must Not Be Named by giving what you can to Joe Miller, or volunteering (from wherever you are). This race represents exactly the kind of change the Republican party needs to make!

Headline from the Energy Daily Network: Obama Vows Energy will Be ‘Top Priority’ in 2011. You mean he’s going to put the oil rigs in the Gulf back to work? Open Alaskan oil fields? Bring in more of our own vast natural resources? Open drilling up in coastal waters? Stop trying to shut down the coal industry? No, no, no, no and not a chance.

He wants to invest even more in his useless clean energy agenda:

One of my top priorities next year is to have an energy policy that begins to address all facets of our overreliance on fossil fuels. We may end up having to do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive omnibus legislation. But we’re going to stay on this because it is good for our economy, it’s good for our national security, and, ultimately, it’s good for our environment.

Au Contraire, Mr. President. Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates claim that if we just get rid of fossil fuels, we’ll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Not going to happen.

Solar and wind are not a great advance over fossil fuels. Since solar and wind installations only produce energy part of the time and require 24/7 backup from conventional power plants to prevent blackouts, there is no net “green” energy produced. Wind turbines produce electricity only about a third of the time. The sun goes down at night. Both require enormous amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy.

Solar and wind will not reduce our dependence on foreign oil. They produce small amounts of electricity while our transportation sector is powered by fossil fuel. Ethanol is more damaging to the environment than fossil fuels, contains less energy, and cannot exist without massive ongoing subsidies.

Electric cars will not reduce the demand for oil. Electric cars have not been sidelined by backers of the internal combustion engine, but by math and physics. Gasoline contains about 80 times as much energy by weight as the best lithium-ion battery. The electric motor is more efficient than the internal combustion engine, but batteries remain finicky, short-lived and take hours to recharge. The electric car will remain the next big thing.

A green economy will not create green American jobs. American turbine manufacturers face the problem of high domestic labor costs. They will have to compete with China, which not only controls the market for neodymium, a critical ingredient in turbine magnets, but has low labor costs. Is a job “green” if it is created only by subsidy or mandate? The ethanol lobbying industry claimed 136,000 jobs for the increased percentage of ethanol, but the Environmental Working Group found only 27,000 at a cost of $446,000 per year.

Yesterday, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a highly regarded federal energy advisory body released an exhaustive “special assessment” of the covert program the White House is pursuing through the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s pending electric utility regulations will subtract between 46 and 76 gigawatts of generating capacity from the U.S. grid by 2015. The worst-case scenario would amount to a reduction of about 7.2% of national power generation, almost all of it will affect coal-fired plants— the workhorse that supplies a little more than half of American electricity.

The EPA’s weapon of choice in the battle to destroy the American economy is regulation. New regulation of mercury and sulfur to coal ash and water intake which cool equipment. NERC notes that the “pace and aggressiveness” of issuing rules in unprecedented. These are conservative estimates and don’t include the EPA’s coming carbon “endangerment” rules.

Some plants can retrofit with scrubbers, but Credit Suisse estimated that compliance will cost as much as $150 billion in capital investment by the end of the decade. That signals a huge rise in electricity costs, which is simply another tax on consumers and businesses, and means more lost jobs. Replacing so much so fast would require shut downs and lead to brownouts and shortages.

This is clearly an effort by the White House to accomplish by regulation what Congress rejected. This president is not going to allow little things like the separation of powers to get in the way of his ideology. The president’s environmental team inspires no confidence whatsoever. He is not interested in debating a carbon program on the merits — there are none. The only way voters can stop the EPA is to install a check in the legislative branch of government on election day next Tuesday.

Democrats have been frightened, and puzzled, by the Tea Parties. They simply don’t get it. And when something their opposition does scares them, they attack.

The Tea Party movement grew quickly from its start with CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli’s rant on February 19, 2009 when he charged that “the government was supporting bad behavior.” Videos of Santelli’s rant went viral. What’s called the Tea Party has been a movement of isolated groups assembling to protest the spending by the Obama administration. Over a year and a half later, these small groups have become a national grassroots movement of people committed to common objectives. Approximately half have never before been involved in politics.

Frightened Democrats quickly found the rallies violent — the original tea party was in support of the Revolution ( they had to look that up). Was this the beginnings of an attempt to overthrow the government? It was not a movement but “a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.”Some liberal writers claimed that the Tea Party was really an American “fascist” movement. Others decided that “the Tea Party is racist.” It’s an accretion of various movements of past decades — a “front group for the Republican party, a “media creation“, “AstroTurf,” invented by “the usual suspects“, the “Christian Right,” the “older anti-Communist Right,” a “conventional Republican group funded by Big Business,” and “those most likely to benefit from right-wing middle class insurgencies are not the embattled middle classes, but the business interests and the wealthy associated with the Republican Party.”

Glen Beck’s big Rally on the Mall in Washington DC was really scary. Hundreds of thousands of people came from all over the country to peacefully protest. The Liberal establishment was reared on protest, violent protest against the Vietnam war being drafted to serve in the Vietnam war, and they knew what protests were supposed to be like. These right wingnuts paid their own way, and even worse, cleaned up neatly after themselves. A few weeks later, Democrats tried to show them up, and even though they bussed in all sorts of SEIU members paid to attend, couldn’t get a significant crowd. That’s something to worry about.

The next line of attack — Liberals all seem to say the same thing at the same time — was the Billionaire Koch brothers. Democrats have so long called the Republicans the “Party of the Rich” and the party of Big Business that they have come to believe that it is true. They try to tar the Republican party with being the party of Wall Street. (In the last election, Wall Street supported Barack Obama, and the administration is filled with people from Goldman Sachs). Although both parties are lucky enough to have some wealthy supporters, Obama’s claims of support from thousands of little people just wasn’t true, he was supported by the labor unions, big money from Wall Street and environmental organizations, and foreign money as well.

After John Kerry’s failure to capture the White House in 2004, George Soros, Progressive Insurance chairman Peter B. Lewis and S&L tycoons Herb and Marion Sandler were angry and depressed. After giving millions of dollars to liberal candidates and 527 groups they had nothing to show for it. They decided they needed a long term strategy to bring the Party back from the political wilderness.

In April 2005. George Soros gathered together a group of seventy millionaires and billionaires to form a fledgling political financial clearinghouse. They called it the Democracy Alliance, and to join there was one requirement. You had to be rich. Members paid a $25,000 fee to join and $30,000 in yearly dues. They must also pledge to give at least $200,000 annually to groups that Democracy Alliance endorses. You have Billionaire George Soros, Billionaire Peter B. Lewis, Billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler, Rob McKay (Taco Bell Fortune), SEIU (Members Dues), Bernard Schwartz (Loral Space & Communications), Rob Glazer (RealNetworks), Tim Gill (Quark), Ann Bowers (widow of Intel founder), and so on through at least seventy members. Lists of the millionaires in Congress are readily available, and dominated by liberals. Blaming Republicans as the party of the rich begins to look a little, well, rich! Being without foundation has never deterred a Democrat accusation.

Google “the Koch Brothers” and you will find articles by the dozens about “Billionaire Koch Brothers” as the evil force behind the Tea Parties (they’re not), Billionaire Koch Brothers are polluters (they don’t buy the global warming myth), The Billionaire Koch Brothers are partly in the business of refining petroleum (dirty oil not clean wind) Fred C. Koch co-founded the company in 1940 and developed an innovative crude oil refining process. His sons, the Billionaire Koch Brothers are libertarians, and confirmed philanthropists. David Koch has recently given one hundred million dollars to Lincoln Center, 2.5 million dollars to the New York City Ballet, over forty million to Sloan Kettering, fifteen million to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a hundred and twenty-five million to M.I.T. for cancer research, twenty million to Johns Hopkins University, and twenty-five million to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. They are concerned with free market causes, and support some of those organizations as well.

You might want to notice that liberal attacks are usually based on — the rich, racists, fascists, fat-cats, Wall Street, Big Business, Big Oil, the poor, the children, the homeless and of course — billionaires. Those on the right want to talk about policy. They want to talk about what works and what doesn’t and why. They want to talk about history and evidence from other countries. Liberals do not want to talk about evidence — it doesn’t interest them. As Nancy Pelosi so aptly described their position: “We have to pass the Health Care bill, so we can find out what’s in it.”

That smug remark sums up the liberal position. Statistics, studies, evidence simply do not matter. What matters is winning, and the power that winning creates. If they actually cared about all those groups they pretend to favor, they would be interested in just how their policy would work. They don’t care that the law they passed that they celebrate as an achievement after 60 years is failing everywhere else. What they care about is that they won.